1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telecommunications including electronic commerce (eCommerce) and electronic services (eServices) and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for monitoring and ranking visitors to call center access points for the purpose of reserving inbound telephone opportunities for those visitors.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of electronic commerce, companies provide Web sites where visitors may, using Internet-capable appliances, browse products, services, and interactive features designed to engage customers in a way that may promote sales through those Web sites or through separate channels associated with those Web sites. Companies also provide or enter contracts with companies who provide call center services that may be reached directly by telephone or indirectly by browsing the company Web sites. In sales, there are many different considerations visited to best determine when a particular customer should be approached and solicited. Therefore, many companies have pre-screening or qualification routines in place and operational at customer access points established for the sales arm of the company that basically work to screen out uninterested persons from taxing the sales process or to direct less interested parties at least to automated self-help systems so that live sales personnel are best utilized in assisting the more highly motivated and qualified potential customers.
The time of the agent is a valuable asset of most contact center systems. Where Web services are in place, there are available widgets that can be provided on Web sites that allow customers to place calls, enter chat rooms, schedule call-backs and the like so that live assistance is always close at hand. For telephone access points like an interactive voice response (IVR) system the pre-screening is performed using the voice application running on the system that interacts with each caller and directs callers whom are not highly motivated to automated services. However, many potential customers that elect live assistance are not actually highly motivated customers. They may elect live assistance when they are merely seeking information or to complain about a product or service, for example. As a result, a lot of time is wasted engaging potential customers that are not qualified or motivated at the time of engagement. In many of these cases redirection to an automated service is the suggested treatment to free up live personnel for better use of time.
The inventor is aware that there are ways to engage or solicit browsing persons at a web page via pop-up or other notification to engage a live agent over a live assistance channel. One consideration that must be made when soliciting many visitors to engage in live interaction is the availability of personnel to handle the added traffic brought in through such activity. In general, a call-in center has peak and slow periods of activity and during peak periods there are often not enough resources (personnel) available to handle the call flow. It is not desirable to solicit a visitor to engage in live assistance and then force the visitor to wait in queue for an unreasonable period of time. Likewise, it is not desirable to have long waiting times for callers who call into the center impromptu who need live assistance.
For Web visitors proactive engagement typically involves pop-up messages inserted into a Web session that invite visitors to establish chat conversations, voice callbacks, or email. Normally contact centers invite web visitors to live assisted conversations when there are enough resources (agents) to process the call without long waiting time.
Sometimes invitations may include inbound toll free numbers to call for immediate live assistance. For IVR interactions callers who elect live services are often dumped into a queue to wait for a next available agent. In an embodiment of the present invention, inviting visitors to accept a scheduled call back is one way to divert traffic to a later time where resources are planned to be available, for example, a planned outbound calling campaign. However the cost of making outbound calls and converting them to inbound calls for agents to pick up from queue is significantly higher than handling inbound calls. It is possible that the numbers of visitors proactively engaged plus the normal inbound call flow exceeds the capability of current resources to handle the calls resulting in longer waits in queue and dropped calls.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for managed inbound routing, inviting persons, such as Web visitors and IVR visitors to accept call in reservations whereby they may call into the center according to a schedule that takes into account predictive statistics about call loads and predictive statistics about resource availability. Such a system would allow that resources would most likely be available to handle the calls without forcing callers to wait in queue.